AMD, Nvidia reap benefits of Intel's Larrabee delay

SAN JOSE, Calif.  Graphics processor makers Advanced Micro Devices and Nvidia Corp. may have gotten long- as well as short-term reprieves from Intel Corp.'s decision not to release the first version of its Larrabee chip.

Intel said late last week it would not release its first implementation of Larrabee, a multi-core x86 processor geared for consumer graphics and technical computing. The chip targeted the high-end graphics markets of AMD and Nvidia beyond the reach of Intel's existing low-performance integrated graphics cores.

Now Intel plans to release the first chip as part of a software developer's kit to seed the market for next-generation Larrabee chips. Intel will announce in 2010 its plans for the development platform as well as future Larrabee chips, said a company spokesman.

Stock prices for AMD and Nvidia shot up seven and 14 percent respectively on the news, according to reports from Reuters and others. "If you are at Nvidia or AMD you can breathe a sigh of relief," said Nathan Brookwood, principal of Insight64 (Saratoga, Calif.).

Longer term AMD and Nvidia may gain a broader strategic advantage.

Part of Intel's rationale for running graphics on an array of x86 cores was it would make programming easier that developing for the even larger arrays of proprietary graphics cores used by AMD and Nvidia. However, that advantage appears to be narrowing.

Microsoft's Windows 7 includes a DirectCompute applications programming interface to run big parallel jobs on traditional graphics processors. Meanwhile, the OpenCL API developed by the Khronos group and backed by a broad range of companies including Apple Inc. is also gaining traction.

"Over the next two years while Intel is re-architecting Larrabee, AMD and Nvidia will ship hundreds of millions of GPUs capable of parallel processing with OpenCL and DirectCompute," said Brookwood. "More and more we'll see application developers use those tools, and they won't even know whether the work is being done on an x86 or GPU core," he added.

Larrabee which uses 16+ x86 cores in its own right is far too big to be a core on a PC processor today. However in say five years it might become viable.
Thus long term AMD and Nvidia want GPU and x86 cores on a chip while Intel wants only x86 cores--a big strategic difference in the many core future.
Watch this space.

Timothy Luke, an analyst with Barclays Capital, said in a report:
"While we believe the setback may negatively impact sentiment, Intel sees Larrabee as a strategic opportunity to position it as Intel's integrated graphics product for its future generation CPU + GPU core"
What this means is that Intel's planning a CPU-GPU dual core for its next processor with the GPU core being Larabee.
That's next a gen multi core heterogeneous processor that will blow everything else off the market.

It can be bad and good to Intel. The scalability of Larrabee 's architecture is questionable. Can dual-ring bus architecture provide enough bandwidth for 32, 64, 128, 512 or more cores? Without more cores how could Larrabee be faster than Nvidia/AMD's hundreds and thousands cores in parallel computing?
Only Intel can offer backup B plan. I expect that the architecture like Intel's 48 core will replace current Larrabee in the future.